I stumbled across Wiki Hunt [99¢] accidentally looking for something completely unrelated on the App Store, and after spending a surprising amount of time playing it this weekend, I can’t help but recommend it to everyone who has ever found themselves hopelessly lost browsing random articles on Wikipedia for an entire afternoon.
The basics idea behind Wiki Hunt is that you start on a Wikipedia article and try to make it to the target article in as few clicks as possible. You can play a completely random game where Wiki Hunt chooses your start page and your end page, a custom game where you pick the start and end, or my personal favorite: Six clicks to Jesus.
The completely random article mode sometimes results in the two pages being so frustratingly different that you can go forever trying to link them together. You can almost always get to the Jesus article inside of a few clicks from even the most random starting article. Of course, if you get stuck, you can always view the solutions which often are extremely amusing by themselves as getting from one article to another often involves the absolute strangest links.
Wiki Hunt is a universal application, and while it’s playable on both devices, not having to use the mobile browser Wikipedia pages makes playing the game on the iPad a much better experience:
Wiki Hunt is surprisingly fun to play with friends, usually involving lots of shoulder surfing and arguing over whether or not you can get to the Christopher Columbus article by clicking through the 1950 Boston Red Sox season article or not. Also, since the game objective requires you to read each of the articles you’re clicking through to figure out how to go next, you find yourself learning all kinds of interesting facts, all while playing a game.
I really can’t believe how much more fun Wikipedia is when you add an extremely basic link searching game on top of it. If you’re a fan of reading random Wikipedia articles, you really need to give Wiki Hunt a spin.
App Store Link: Wiki Hunt, 99¢ (Universal)
